1. Field of the Invention
This invention generally relates to the field of management of authentication information and more specifically to secure management of authentication information in a distributed computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
As the popularity of the Internet increases, consumers are increasingly using the Internet to conduct business, organize their lives and access information. Thus, users today use the Web to do their banking, make stock trades, review their personal medical information and perform other tasks involving sensitive data. In order to protect consumers' sensitive data, web sites typically require a user to be authenticated in order to access confidential information. Authentication usually includes the provision of a user name, or login name, and a password. As a result, many Internet users today are required to manage a large number of user names and passwords for various web sites and security contexts. This can be time consuming to manage and tedious. It is common for users to keep their authentication information in an unsecured file, often just a plain text file, or a physical list
There are several problems with unsecured files or lists. For example, most of these files and lists are not properly secured by any sort of security or encryption method. Second, these files keep growing in size and structure beyond what's manageable via a simple text editor. Other major drawbacks of these files are the lack of formal backup and the lack of availability across computing devices. Further, there is not an easy way for exposing any of the information in these files to other applications or users without compromising the entire file.
One known solution to this problem is provided by features of the Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser (available form Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.). Internet Explorer stores passwords for a user and provides completion assistance for form values. However, Internet Explorer does not provide a mechanism for storing a form's complete state, such as the states of HTML elements such as checkboxes and radio buttons. Further, Internet Explorer only stores one set of authentication data per URL, and does not allow multiple identities to be associated with a single URL. Additionally, Internet Explorer makes authentication data part of the operating system configuration, and fails to address management of multiple identities across multiple computers.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems discussed above, and particularly for a way to more securely manage authentication information in a distributed computing environment.